Book 134

Pets Go Pop!, by Bob Staake, L.B. Kids (Little, Brown & Company) 2009

As a children's librarian, I had a love/hate relationship with pop-up books.  I loved them because they were fantastically cool, so cool that kids always wanted to check them out, which was great.  What I didn't like was how quickly the ones that were for circulation fell apart, or even worse, some of the more elaborate pop-up books were turned into reference books and could not be checked out at all.  As a children's librarian, pop-up books frustrated me.  Now, however, I buy books as a mother, and I just love pop-up books.

As much as I want to jump in and write about the mechanics of Pets Go Pop!, I'll stick to my formula and write about the text first.  The text is simple and it works.  I don't buy pop-up books for the writing, so if is at all amusing, I am happy.  And I am happy.

In general, the only way that Bob Staake's artwork could possibly be improved would be to make it 3D, like a pop-up book, like Pets Go Pop!  The engineering of this book is beyond amazing.  My husband is an engineer and mechanics of this book fascinated and baffled him.  He kept opening and closing the book to see how everything fit together until my son had enough and took the book back.  My son doesn't yet appreciate engineering; he just loves the way the crazy, colorful animals jump off of the page every time he opens the book.  So far, this book has stood up to my Tornado Thomas.  That also makes me happy.